Lance Lawton wrote:

Hi folks,

Again a general advice from me addressed to everyone I can remember having as Facebook friends and whose e-mail address I have ...

You might recall me writing a few months ago about the experience of having my Facebook account disabled for reasons that remained mysterious. A week or two later my account was restored and the explanation given for the disabling was a suspicion that my account "may" have been hacked (used by someone else without my knowledge) for phishing or some other scamming activity. I was advised to set a stronger password, which I duly did.

All was sweetness and light for about 6 weeks ... then I was disabled again - just as suddenly and with just as much trouble getting an answer from Facebook management. This time (advised yesterday) the result is more drastic - death, in Facebook terms. i.e. I've been informed that "Your account has been disabled because you exceeded Facebook's limits on multiple occasions when sending friend requests" and "we have determined that you violated our Terms of Use by misusing our site features to harass other users. We will not be able to reactivate your account for any reason. This decision is final."

So folks, it seems you're reading the words of a gross serial abuser, with Facebook as judge and jury. Basically Facebook runs software on its server which is intended to block spam and such like. But unfortunately a lot of innocents get caught in its web, and there's not a lot of human intervention applied when a user's account gets automatically disabled because some activity threshold has been breached. This phenomenon is well documented and goes back pretty much to the beginnings of Facebook. Facebook management are pretty secretive about how it all works and persistently maintain that they are not able to provide details of what levels or kinds of activity would cause disciplinary action. And numerous appeals from affected users and also from industry lobbyists are simply ignored. Add to that the recent change to the Terms of Service in which Facebook asserted direct ownership of all material posted on the user accounts, and there are a lot of very unhappy people in the Facebook world.

So suffice it to say, I won't be a Facebook user again -- a. because I'm persona no grata, and b. because in light of the above standard of treatment I'm not sure I want an account now anyway.

Beyond that I'll say no more. The purpose of this is basically to let you know why I'm no longer on Facebook; in no sense am I trying to persuade you to boycott Facebook. If it's of any interest, my ID on Twitter is eN0ch .

Regards, Lance

2 March 2009